Instead-of-What Blogging for Business

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Back in 1764, I was reminded by the editors of Mental Floss Magazine, Scottish engineer James Watt was pondering the same question that’s on all of our minds when we’re doing blog marketing – How do I convince people they should use my product?  (In the case of us freelance content writers, of course, we’re trying to sell our clients’ products and services.)

Watt had improved the steam engine, but mine operators continued to rely on horses to haul heavy loads. Watt calculated that it took a horse one minute to lift 33,000 pounds of coal one foot. A machine that did that job had a horsepower of 1. Watt’s calculation, the editors point out, was less than scientifically accurate.  Still, because it was based on the familiar, on information the miners already knew, his logic persuaded mine owners to try his engine.

One core function of blog marketing is explaining yourself, your business philosophy, your products, and your processes – all with an eye to converting readers into customers and clients. An effective blog clarifies what sales trainers like to call your “unique value proposition” in terms readers can understand. And one excellent way to do just that is by making comparisons with things with which readers are already comfortable and familiar!  As Dale Carnegie himself advised, “compare the strange with the familiar.” 

“Before engines could take off, one inventor had to get marketing down to a science,” conclude the Mental Floss editors. Since inbound marketing has been, since 2006, “the most effective marketing method for doing business online,” hubspot.com advises aligning the content with your customers’ interests and levels of understanding.

James Watt was able to persuade the mining operators of his time that the new machines would make a good “instead of” for the horses they were accustomed to using.

As blog content writers, we need to know what products and services our target audience is accustomed to using, then make a powerful case for the value of what we’re offering instead.

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Bullet Points – Baddie or Boon for your Business Blog?

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Who would’ve thunk – such ballyhoo about bullet points! It seems content writers either love or absolutely abhor those little black dots.

Representing the critics, Ken Lopez, in The Litigation Consulting Report, lists no fewer than 12 reasons bullet points are bad news, especially for trial graphics. He’d much rather see lawyers actually speaking to the jury, rather than showing them text-heavy presentations riddled with bullet points.

Jon of Presentation Advisors is equally antipathetic towards bullet points in PowerPoint presentations.  PowerPoint and Prezi, he says, aren’t text-based media, but are there to support the information coming out of a speaker’s mouth. What’s more, he gripes, when we use bullets, we tend to lump ideas together on the same slide without giving any one of those ideas a chance to shine.

As a business blogger, I’m kind of partial to bullet points, and from what I’ve been told, Google and the other search engines like them, too.  Online searchers who’ve found our blog posts, remember, aren’t getting the information out of our mouths – we have only our written words, with perhaps some charts or pictures, to engage their attention.

That lists and bullet points are generally a good fit for blogs is something I actually stress in corporate blogging training sessions.  What I’ve found over the years is that lists help keep readers – and writers – on track.

Susan Gunelius (“20 Ideas for Writing a Blog Post”) apparently agrees. She suggests starting with a number, then taking it from there, with. Top 10 lists, 5 things not to do, 3 reasons I love something, etc.

Interesting that in just the past two weeks, there’s been a lot of press about David Letterman’s plans to retire. Letterman’s Top Ten Lists were such an effective way of organizing content that, when the talk show host first moved to CBS, NBC unsuccessfully tried to claim ownership of the idea.

Like anything else, of course, bullet points can be both poorly used and over-used. Using parallelism is a good rule, beginning each bullet point with the same part of speech and using the same grammatical form throughout.

Writers.stackexchange.com has some wisdom to add: “Bullet points are visually attractive and make it easy for a reader to locate important information. Nevertheless, try to use them sparingly: too many bullet-pointed sections in the same document will mean that their impact is lost.”

Love ’em or hate ’em, those little back dots have their uses in blogging for business!

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Are Your 100,000 Going Into Your Business Blog?

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“You may not think of yourself as a writer, but research says that you are,” observes
Tom Searcy, CEO of Hunt Big Sales. The average sales person, with emails, proposals, quotes, texts, and other documentation, writes more than 2,000 words per week,  he explains, which adds up to 100,000 words a year.

Not that more is necessarily better, Searcy hastens to add. In fact, he cautions, you want to use as few words as possible to communicate your idea, a tactic he calls ”writing tight.”

Writing tight is good advice for sales presentations and for business blogs.  Interestingly enough, though, the business owners and professionals I talk to tend to be worried about the opposite thing happening – running out of material. month or two into blogging for their business, the glaring question for them is, “So, what else is there to blog about?” 

That’s where those existing 100,000 words might enter the picture. Repurposing content that, while valuable, may be languishing in the email newsletter archive is one way to give it new life. Paul Chaney of Practical Ecommerce points out that “for many companies, email newsletters are relegated to monthly syndication. That means the prospect or customer is only contacted 12 times per year, not nearly enough to establish a ‘top-of-mind’ relationship.” Business blog posts can fill that gap, at the same time making use of the already-written material.

As a business blogging trainer, I’ve always prescribed RALA (Read-Around-Learn-Around) as the cure for content deprivation. Ideas are all over the place, all of the time, I explain, but you’ve got to do a lot of reading and listening and be alert for connections to your own topic. Sharing OPW (Other People’s Wisdom” is one valuable service you can provide your readers.

But, as Tom Searcy is showing us, we blog content writers can look within for our content as well. In line with that idea. NPR Digital media uses the acronym C.O.P.E. standing for Create Once, Publish Everywhere.

How many of YOUR 100,000 words are ending up in your business blog?

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To Become a Great Business Blogger, Become a Know-it-All

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 Wow!  Fellow blogging coach Jon Morrow really is painfully honest in his “How to Be Smart in a World of Dumb Bloggers”! Reality is, Morrow explains to readers dissatisfied with traffic to their blogs, “popular bloggers are smarter than you are.”

One thing that makes those popular bloggers smarter is, according to Morrow, “They know damn near everything about their topic.  And if they don’t know it, it’s in their reading pile.” So does that mean all the rest of us blog content writers are doomed?  Not at all, says Morrow.  This isn’t about genetics or inborn talent, he asserts. It’s about deciding who you want to be and making yourself smarter. It’s about working to become a know-it-all.

As for Morrow himself, he listens to interviews during breakfast, reads nonfiction over lunch, watches “the smartest TV he can find” during dinner and the day’s news afterwards, then some nonfiction before going to bed.  In the car, he listens to books on tape, and spends a portion of each weekend watching recordings of conferences he couldn’t attend.

The bottom line of this “letting us have it” essay is that “Blogging isn’t only about SEO or social networking.”  It’s about us, we business bloggers need to realize.  We have to change, surrounding ourselves with smart people, burying ourselves in books, and “cutting the crap” (his words, not mine) that he says is distracting us out of our lives.

”Read around, learn around” is my version of Morrow’s advice. Ideas are all over the place, all of the time, but we’ve got to see and hear those ideas, learning everywhere and from everyone, making connections between our own experience and knowledge and Other People’s Wisdom.  We business bloggers then share that OPW in blog posts to help visitors understand what our business owner clients do, what they sell, and what their businesses are really all about.

I agree with Jon Morrow – becoming “know-it-alls” is what it’s all about for us content  writers!

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Simplifying the Complex in Business Blog Posts

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“It’s tempting to want to explain everything. It’s also hard to know what to throw out,” observes Dane of digital  accomplice.com. Dane is talking about video, but the same simplify-the-complex is certainly a guideline for all of us business blog content writers. Of course, with blog posts far less expensive to produce than videos, it’s somewhat simpler to focus on just one aspect of a topic and then come back and fill in other information in later posts.

Some products and services are, without question, more challenging to explain. “If, after your thirty-second elevator pitch, the person you’re speaking with still has ten more clarifying questions, says Jeune Ortiz of future-ink.com, you probably have a complex product or service.

Ortiz has some good suggestions for blog content writers when it comes to presenting the complex in a way that converts lookers into buyers.

Use What They Know.
Compare the old solution to your new solution to show improvements. Using your blog to offer answers to you’ve heard from customers in the past can help business blog readers relate to the new information.

Let Customers Explain It.
“Stories that illustrate how your product or solution was used successfully can do a lot to help a newcomer understand how it might also improve their life,” says Ortiz. “Customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a brand story.  They want to tell themselves the story”, say the authors of “Tips and Traps for Marketing Your Business”.
Don’t Scare Your Visitors.                                                                                                                                                                   Technical words can overwhelm your visitors. If you have policies, disclaimers, or warranties, add that to the footer, never in the main content. I train newbie blog content writers that going light on jargon and technical terms without “dumbing down” the material shows respect for the readers’ intellect – and for their time.

Tell Them How to Get Started.
The product is complicated enough – don’t make getting started a mystery, advises Ortiz.  Simplify the navigation and have clear Calls to Action.

As we bloggers have learned, simplifying the complex pays dividends for business owners and professionals every time!

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